Probably most of you have heard about AdSense, the ad serving program run by Google. It is very simple to have a website to display ads using AdSense, as you only need to include an external script with a few parameters (that mainly configure the size and colors of the ads). For each click in a banner of the website, the associated AdSense account gets a bit of money.

However, this is not the only way to get AdSense in your pages. Google has the "AdSense API", which consists in several web services that allow sharing the revenue of the banners between the website owner and the content publisher. That way, website with user generated content can pay their users if their content is useful.

A customer asked me to modify their website so they can share some of the benefits of their banners with the creators of the articles in their site using the AdSense API. I’ll detail some of my experiences with the integration of the AdSense API in the webpage.

As I had to deal with web services, and I was comfortable with the web service support present in the .NET Framework 2.0, the easiest thing to do for me was to follow that route. However, I always try to learn new stuff when I can, so it was an excellent chance for me to learn WCF. Creating a proxy for a web service in WCF is as easy as in .NET Framework 2.0. However, the problems started really soon. For some unknown reason, the Google guys require some SOAP headers in the web service calls that are not exposed in the AdSense’s WSDL. Reading some of the comments in the AdSense Group revealed that the SOAP headers were exposed previously but they were removed without giving any reason. I found this to be really annoying and. It can be fixed adding the headers to the OutgoingMessageHeaders in the current OperationScope. Only for this detail the Adsense API can be labeled as unfriendly for the developers.

Once you set the headers manually, it is easy to call to the different methods to create AdSense accounts, associate them with a publisher and generate the code to display ads. However, I found very confusing some parts of the documentation, specially all the ids available (you end up using clientId, publisherId,  synServiceId, developerId, and in some methods having to pass the same id twice).

Inspecting the generated code for the WCF proxy, I found one thing I didn’t like about WCF. The DataContractSerializer does not handle bare arrays, so the generated code was using the XmlSerializer for a lot of things that need directly or indirectly to handle bare arrays in the AdSense API. The official statement of Microsoft about this seems to be that bare arrays do not support the distinction between null arrays and empty arrays, so the best is to use a wrapped collection.

The AdSense API has a technical requirements page that informs you how to proceed in some interactions with the users and how to react to error conditions. The AdSense API methods expose the fault details as specified in the AdSenseApiException. When an error happens when your WCF proxy is calling to the AdSense API, a FaultException is generated. I was expecting the proxy to receive a FaultException< AdSenseApiException> instead so I could easily access to the exception details but that wasn’t the case (maybe that only works in WCF to WCF scenarios?). I tried to create a generic error handler in order to convert the SOAP faults to the FaultException<AdSenseApiException> type, but the information I found about WCF error handling in the web was only talking about server side error handling using the IErrorHandler interface. It was clear that I needed more in depth knowledge of WCF in order to do that. After some research I bought Inside Windows Communication Foundation:

The book was exactly what I was looking for. Good and detailed internal information about how WCF worked.

Thanks to the book I was able to make my proxy generate the FaultException<AdSenseApiException> transparently, but it wasn’t easy. Well, it is not difficult but you have to create a lot of classes to do something simple.

A channel exposes a method called GetProperty<T>. When an exception is generated in the channel, the GetProperty<T> method is called with a parameter of type FaultConverter. The method should return an an instance of a FaultConverter, which creates the appropriate exception/fault type. To solve my problem I created an AdSenseFaultConverter:

However, in order to expose the AdSenseFaultConverter I had to create a ChannelFactory (AdSenseChannelFactory), a channel (AdSenseChannelBase and AdSenseRequestChannel), a Binding (AdSenseHttpBinding), and a BindingElement (AdSenseBindingElement). A lot of classes with little added value just to override the GetProperty<T> method in the channel. Also, to be able to use the configuration instead of setting up the communication programmatically, I had to create a configuration BindingElement(AdSenseHttpBindingElement) and a CollectionBindingElement (AdSenseHttpBindingCollectionElement). As I said before, it is a lot of code.

One thing that I haven’t commented yet is that your AdSense API implementation needs to be reviewed in order to be able to serve live ads, and you need to follow some policy requirements that you need to carefully study as they want to control even the help pages you put in your web site. One of the requirements to be eligible to participate in the AdSense API program is to have more than 100000 daily page views. This is a showstopper for most of the web sites making the AdSense API useless for 99.9% of the people.

Another negative point of the AdSense API is that the WSDL has been broken for more than a month. I planned to write this article a couple of months ago so I don’t know if the WSDL of the AdSense API is still invalid or not, but having it broken for more than a month can give you an idea of the overall satisfaction I have with the AdSense API.

To finish talking about the AdSense API, I have to mention the Sandbox. The development web services don’t behave exactly as the live web services (something that I hate), so some methods need to have additional headers when testing the API to work properly. Why? Well, basically because they do not have a decent sandbox. They just have the development version of the web services and you have to live with that. No GUI for managing the developers accounts, payments or something similar to the AdSense account webpage. If you compare this to other sandboxes like the paypal one where you can even receive the IPN confirmation messages you can clearly see the difference.

And the last rant of the post is about Google policies regarding to AdWords and AdSense. If you are an European citizen and you want to advertise using AdWords, Google forces you to pay in Euros. However, when you have AdSense in your page, Google will pay you in dollars. Judging by the prices of the ads in AdWords and the money you receive with AdSense, Google is taking advantage of the European citizens by charging a 60% more for an ad in AdWords and paying a 60% less for it (the exchange rate is approximately 1 euro = 1.60 dollars). Is the European commission too busy fining Microsoft for including free products with Windows to investigate things like this?

To sum up, I’m completely disappointed with Google and their AdSense API. If some people ever had the illusion that Google was a non evil company that did the things the right way, they need to wake up.

From time to time I like to evaluate the way I’m working, investigate on new alternatives, try other approaches, etc. in order to improve the way I do things. Other times, I have to change the way I do some things by necessity. This time was a bit of both. The number of components I’m selling on my web page www.manuelabadia.com is growing slowly and some things I was doing by hand were a pain to maintain and started to take too much time, so a change was really needed. Also, in the development area, things were also getting more complex.

Distribution of the components by mail is a lot less reliable than I thought as some companies have really strict firewall/attachment policies. Implementing a decent LicenseProvider based on digital signature was more complex than I thought, has some hurdles with ASP.NET and works a bit different between web site projects and web application projects. However, having the LicenseProvider implemented has freed me of all component distribution and signing, saving a lot of time and headaches.

Maintaining and developing new components was also getting more complicated, because components were starting to share code, and having to maintain two versions of the same code is problematic and error prone. However, splitting the components in several projects and then using ILMerge seems to work great. Improving my subversion merge/branch skills was also necessary as I end with a lot of releases with a very similar codebase but with little differences between them. Better tool integration for ordinary tasks with Visual Studio has also helped a lot. I’ll comment about a few of these tools in a future.

There seem to be a lot of good tools emerging with a goal to improve the quality and reliability of our code. Microsoft research is also trying some things with Spec# and Pex. Maybe I’ll blog about those when Pex becomes available to the masses.

So what about the future? Well, I have a lot of ideas for new components and new features for the existing ones. As always, the biggest problem is time. There’s no time to do all the stuff I have in mind or the cool things I want to try (has anybody tried SharpMap?) I have a component in the works that has been nearly finished for a couple of months. I hope to finish it at the end of the year or in January 2008. After that probably I’ll concentrate on further improving the existing components and checking if something new can be added if the version of ASP.NET shipped Visual Studio 2008 has a couple of significant changes. After that probably I won’t release more components because I can’t be sure to be able to provide a good service if I release more components.
 
As I said before, the sales are growing slowly, and the components are being used in most of the “important” countries:

This shows me that I’m doing things well and encourages me to work harder and keep improving my skills.

My trip to London was very good. I went with 4 friends and with my girlfriend. We flew with Ryanair and arrived to the Stansted Airport. To return to Spain we flew with FlyMonarch and departed from Gatwick. It seems that I look like a dangerous person or something because I was the only one of us that had to submit to random searches before taking both flights.

Our hotel was the Jurys at Kensington (quite nice BTW). We were almost exclusively in central London (tube zones 1 and 2), and we visited a lot of things:

- St. Paul’s cathedral – nearly 700 stairs to arrive to the top.

I took this some pics at the top to do a cool panoramic image although I didn’t take enough to have a perfect panorama…
- Tower of London – I expected more from this.

- Tower Bridge – Nice one, but we couldn’t watch it at night.


- Kensington Palace – The garden was very nice. We aren’t used to see big green gardens because where I live we have drought contingences.

- British Museum – just a quick visit because it is BIG. It’s amazing how many things they have “taken” from other cultures…



- Big Ben and Houses of Parliament – I was a bit disappointed when I saw it during the day. However during the night the lighting added the beauty that was missing during the day.

- London Eye – We didn’t try it as I didn’t like big wheels very much.

- Namco Station – Couldn’t resist seeing a 35000 square feet place with a lot of arcade games. Unfortunately there wasn’t any old arcade machine.

- Trafalgar Square and Picadilly Circus – we needed to see this to make our London visit more complete.

- Portobello – The girls really need to go to the Portobello market…

- Westminster abbey – Very nice, but we run out of time so we couldn’t enter…

- Natural History Museum – The building was big and beautiful and the museum was cool. Very recommended, especially if you have kids.

- Buckingham Palace – There was a lot of people for the changing of guard, but for me it was an incredibly boring experience.

Some things that surprised me:

- Those “Look Left” and “Look right” labels near the pedestrian crossings.
- The quantity of foreigners in the city.
- The weather. Where we came from we usually have sun and about 40ºC from june to September and it is very rare to see some rain. However in London, there wasn’t more than 20ºC and the weather changes a lot. It rains a lot of times a day. Now, I understand a lot better why they love our sunny beaches ;)
- Most of the houses were very pretty and no more than 3 or 4 floors.

The excuse to go to London was to see Aerosmith at the Hyde Park Calling on Sunday. We had early access to the festival, but before Aerosmith there were 6 hours to wait where other bands were playing… we arrived at 12:00 and the festival ended at 22:30. I also wanted to see Joe Satriani that was playing in another stage an hour before Aerosmith, however, when we arrived to the main stage, it was clear that leaving the stage and returning to it was a more than difficult task, so we didn’t move from there.

We say the following bands: The Micki Free Electric Blues, Archid, The Answer, Jet, Chris Cornell and Aerosmith. Unfortunately, it was raining most of the time. Light showers most of the time, but it only stopped when Aerosmith started the show.

I was pretty tired before the festival for all our walks to see London, and after 8 hours stand up, I was really tired. When Aerosmith appeared my legs were a bit more responsive, but after the show I went quickly to the hotel because I was exhausted. The set list was very short:

- Love In An Elevator
- Same Old Song And Dance
- Cryin'
- Eat The Rich
- I Don't Want To Miss A Thing
- Jaded
- Baby Please Don't Go
- Hangman Jury / Seasons Of Wither
- Dream On
- Livin' On The Edge
- Stop Messin' Around
- Sweet Emotion
- Draw The Line
- Walk This Way (with Darryl McDaniels (DMC)) 

The show was excellent but only 80 minutes! Are they that old that they can play for two hours? We all left Hyde Park a bit angry because of that. 80 minutes do not compensate a 2000 Km travel and more than 10 hours stand up. At least we were in 15th row thanks to the early entrance tickets.

Here are some pics and videos of the show:

To sum up, we enjoyed a lot our visit to London. It’s sad to hear the news about the current status in London due to terrorists threats.

I have been using Vista for some time now and I have to say that I’m happy with it. There are some minor things I don’t like that the longer time it takes to delete and copy some files, some problems debugging ASP.NET apps and such little things that make you spend some time to have everything working properly.

However, I had a horror story with drivers. I didn’t had any serious issue with my computer until last week when I decided to install Virtual PC 2007 in order to try Orcas. When I started Virtual PC to try the orcas virtual hard disk images, my hard disk stopped for a minute, then the hard disk restarted and just a second after, it stopped again and so on. When the hard disk stopped the mouse was working but if you switched from the active window, the system waits for the hard disk to respond.

This hard drive issue happened three or four times previously, but after one stop and restart of the hard drive the system continued to work properly and I wasn’t able to reproduce it again, so I didn’t spent more time on such a sporadic issue. But this time, I really needed to study the cause.

The hard disk is a Maxtor STM 3250820AS and my motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 . The first thing I did was to download the utility image to test the hard disk. The test didn’t found any error on the hard disk. Anyway I called to the tech support in case they know something about the problem or if they have a newer firmware but it wasn’t the case. Then I took a look to the motherboard manufacturer to see if there were drivers for Vista but there wasn’t any driver for Vista. As the motherboard is a nForce4 motheboard I download the latest nvidia drivers and I installed them. The result was that the network connection didn’t worked and the hard drive was still failing. I opened a tech support ticket on the motherboard manufacturer page and on the nvidia page.

The first one told me that my motherboard didn’t support Vista so if I have any problem, they are sorry but won’t do anything. I don’t find a good practice to drop support of a product that can be bought only a few months before Vista was released but there is something to think about when deciding which motherboard to buy next…

Nvidia support was really bad. They told me to contact the hard disk and the motherboard manufacturer, even if I told him that I already contacted Maxtor. I’m wondering if they read all the ticket before replying… After quite a few replies they didn’t give me any solution.

So I was on my own and finally managed to get the SATA HDD working by hand installing twice a driver from the folder where the nvidia drivers get extracted. The driver does not seem to be bug free but at least I was able to finally install Orcas.

Life is complicated enough so I really hate to have to spend time with things like this…

The other day I was searching some SSIS related stuff in google when the I stumbled upon with this:

I'm not sure why google showed that message because I wasn't doing anything unusual. Maybe the problem was that a word of my search was "password" but I'm not sure. Anyway, after using google exclusively for several years, they forced me to use another search engine...

Recently I was pointed out by a friend that a new version of the Hibernate Reference book was released. I have already read the old version of this book, called "hibernate in action" but as it was half the size of the new book, I decided to read this one too. Even if the content is heavily based on the previous version, a lot of parts have been rewritten and it is a lot more clear now (or maybe it is just that I'm a better hibernate user...). Also, I found out that someone is finally doing a book about NHibernate:

I didn't want to talk about the book in this post. What really caught my attention was the improvements in the Java 1.5 language. I haven't coded anything in Java for quite a few years (the last version I used was 1.3). In that time the Java language didn't have any important changes but the version 1.5 has added a lot of useful things to the language: Generics, Metadata, Boxing/Unboxing, Enumerations and variable number of arguments.

Does some of this sound familiar to you? Java implemented Generics a bit before .NET Framework 2.0 but all the other stuff was already present in the first version of the .NET Framework. Also, something that I can't live without now is Properties and Java doesn't has them. Simulating properties using a get_/set_ methods is nothing more than a dirty hack (you can also simulate OOP in assembler...)

I have been an early .NET adopter since the beginning of the .NET Framework and a lot of my friends were jumping on me about that, because in their opinion Java was a lot better, the .NET Framework was crap, etc. Now they have to shut up ;-)

The local companies here are also using more .NET than Java and I have read some studies that said that both technologies are similar but usually is less expensive to develop with .NET (unfortunately I haven't found the links). Also, if you consider the new features added since the release of .NET Framework v2.0 (WPF, WF, WCF, ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, LINQ, DLINQ...) clearly Java is lagging behind .NET.

Last week my hard disk started making some strange sounds and stopped responding for a few seconds. I rebooted the PC to see if it was a temporary issue but then a INSERT SYSTEM DISK message appeared because the system wasn't able to access the disk anymore.

I started to panic because I had a lot of stuff that I haven't backup in quite a while and there are very few things that I hate more than doing something that I have already done. Also, I didn't have any of those Linux live CDs to see if I could save something. I turned on the PC several times that day to see if it was booting but I wasn't lucky. That night I didn't sleep very well.

The next morning, I was going to take the PC for repair but before doing that I tried it again and it worked. Sometimes the hard disk stopped responding for some seconds but I was able to save everything I wanted. Lesson learned. I don't have to be so lazy when and do backups more often.

I got a replacement for the hard disk and it was time to reinstall everything. My PC really needed a reinstall because it was very messy after 2 years of use but I didn't had time and energy to do it. So this sounded like a good oportunity to install Vista so I inserted the x64 spanish version (that arrived just a few days ago from my MSDN subscription). My first impression wasn't very good because after installing Vista internet was really slow and the sound wasn't working. Also, I was a bit biased because of the bad comments that have been on the net about Vista. The first thing that Vista did was to connect to windows update and found 30MB of updates. It took more than 1 hour to download those updates. Fortunately after the update, everything was working good.

After that I installed SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 and got the PC ready to work. The installation was a bit problematic because of some Vista incompatibilities but finally managed to get it running. I hope Microsoft will completely fix those Vista issues soon.

Now I have to recover the time lost...

Another year ends and a new one comes. Life goes as fast as usual and we’re keep on our way. It’s time to think about it… our actions, hopes, wishes, mistakes, etc.

I usually listen to a special song a few minutes after the start of the year. In the last few years I have been choosing "Aerosmith – Full Circle" because it has special connotations for me.

I wish you the best in the coming year.

When you spent more time in a chair than in bed you have to take care of your back and choose a good chair. I was using a SteelCase Leap chair until now but I have never been really comfortable with it and last month I realized that the back of the chair was more twisted than usual in a side. It is still on warranty so it will be fixed but they will take more than a month to repair it.

Therefore, it was a perfect moment to buy a new chair and I decided to not make the same mistake again so I purchased a Herman Miller Aeron Titanium Chair Size B with posture fit. It was really expensive but if I think in the number of hours that I will be using the chair and in my back health, it is money well invested.

Here are a couple of pics of the chair:

Everyone who tries it is very happy with it but when I told them how much it costs they say I’m crazy. Time will tell…

Here (in Spain) most companies I know buy very cheap chairs. I’m curious to know what happens in other countries.

The NDoc creators where spending a lot of time with the project with very little (if any) economic reward as it is happening in most open source projects (my personal experience with M.A.M.E. was even worse, because us (the developers) didn’t get a buck but a lot of people outside the team were getting tons of money, illegally selling it in cabinets or creating commercial console (or computer) arcade packs using the MAME source code without permission…) So, they have discontinued NDoc.

As Visual Studio 2005 didn’t come with a documentation generator (as Visual Studio 2003 had) this was a big problem for the dot net community, but Microsoft reacted quickly and created SandCastle, a cool documentation project. The problem is that SandCastle is in beta stage and it doesn’t have any GUI yet so you have to run several executables one after another to get the documentation. You can download the current version here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E82EA71D-DA89-42EE-A715-696E3A4873B2&displaylang=en

And there is a nice blog about information in how to use the executables to get the documentation done here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sandcastle

As most people (myself included) don’t want to spent a lot of time and neurons in order to build a CHM documentation file, Eric Woodruff has provided a nice GUI that makes using SandCastle straightforward (and it’s very similar to the one provided by NDoc):

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/SandcastleBuilder.asp

If you are curious, here you have a screenshot of the generated CHM file using the most common settings:

And talking about sandcastles… here are two from my visit to Torrevieja (Spain) this summer:

As always the holidays seem to be too short, especially after the incident with my ankle that made me lost 2 weeks. This situation made me spent a lot of time reading some books I didn’t expect to read until the end of the year or beginning of 2007. The books I read were related to the new business intelligence features of SQL Server 2005:

In general terms the books were good, although in my opinion the part that talks about creating custom integration services components was too short. I haven’t finished the book about analysis services (I only read the first 9 chapters) and will not do it yet. The books assumes that you have a data warehouse to use as a base for analysis services but it didn’t explain how to build one so I think I’ll have to buy a good book about that. I have been told that The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit does a good job so I’ll be purchasing it as soon as possible.

Something that I’m still thinking is how easily Reporting Services has become a better product than Crystal Reports even the second one has a lot of years in the market.

I’m interested in seeing what comes up when I put everything to work in a real project…

I’ll start to look deeply into Atlas this month so I hope I can find some free time to post some detailed posts about it.

On my second day of vacation I bent my ankle playing stepmania so I can't use my right feet for at least 14 days :(

So I'm spending most of the time in the computer (as usual) but without internet access.

I hope to be able to do something unusual at the end of the month...

I'm going on vacation until the end of august.

I'll be here and here most of the time.

Unfortunately I don't have internet access available but I'll be checking my email from time to time.

Of course I take a computer with me so I'll be learning something new this holidays (maybe Atlas or SSIS).

If you can understand portuguese I recommend you to take a look at Luis Abreu's webcasts about Atlas.

Have a nice month ;-)

First I have to apologize for not posting anything in nearly two weeks, but a lot of things have happened lately: I did a quick work (a week) for Namco Mobile; I have been two days in bed with temperature; I did a Reiki first degree course; too much work in the last days and a lot more to come until august…

I read somewhere that Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 will be released at the end of the year. Even if it is not a complete change of the .NET Framework 2.0 and can be seen as .NET Framework 2.0 + Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) + Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) + Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) + Windows CardSpace (WCS) it is kind of a pain to be learning version 2.0 and have a new release before mastering .NET Framework 2.0. If you add Atlas to the mix the conclusion is: “Too many things to learn and no time to do it!”. I hope we can live with .NET Framework 3.0 for a few years.

I don’t know what happens in other cities/countries but most of the companies here are still using .NET 1.x and probably a lot of them will still be using it when .NET 3.0 is released…

Talking about other things, I have started to add full design time support to the ExtendedObjectDataSource package and this is what I have at the moment:

As you can see I have added more options that are not present in the standard ObjectDataSource like being able to configure paging in the wizard and also being able to choose also the SelectCountMethod (for the CompatObjectDataSource. The ExtendedObjectDataSource can extract the total row count in the SelectMethod).

If somebody misses something in the wizard let me know ASAP so I can think of including it.

Every time I have to use Winforms I really hate the poor control set that is available (at least in version 2.0 you have a menu that does not look like it was made for windows 95 :-P). I can’t believe that the framework didn’t ship with a wizard control so I had to waste my time coding one.

To finish this post, I’ll tell you a cool tip to debug design time stuff. Forget everything that you did to set up the project to debug design time classes. You’ll have a debugger attached to the current Visual Studio instance and awaiting your orders if you add this line of code where you want the debugger to show up:

System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch();

Right now you can access to this blog just typing http://www.manuelabadia.com. However, in a few days that redirection will point to another page. So if you use http://www.manuelabadia.com to access to this blog, please use http://www.manuelabadia.com/blog.

In the last months I have got used to make a panoramic photograph of the places I have visited. I don’t know why but I’ve never been very interested in professional photography and that’s why I have a Casio EX-S500, a very compact point and click camera that fits in a pocket and is able to record MPEG4 movies.

There are a lot of panoramic tools to join individual pictures to make a panoramic but you always end up having to retouch the result to fix some artifacts that appear. Here are two panoramic photographs I took at Mazarrón and Barcelona (both here at Spain):

The first one was very tricky as some zones were very close to the camera and the sun changed the colors of some pics quite a bit.

If you want to see the panoramics in full glory take a look here (you'll need to have Quick Time installed):

http://www.manuelabadia.com/pano/mazarron.html

http://www.manuelabadia.com/pano/barcelona.html

The final resolution of the first one is 14239x939 and the second one is 4389x986.

After making the panoramic photographs I used the free version of this program to make them more interactive:

http://www.pano2qtvr.com/

If you want to know where are Mazarrón and Barcelona located:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=mazarr%C3%B3n&ll=37.558459,-1.28392&spn=0.011873,0.026779&t=k&om=1

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=barcelona&t=k&om=1&ll=41.389302,2.1698&spn=0.089893,0.214233

This week has been a different week for me.

Last week I was talking with a friend’s neighbour:

He: “So you work with computers, right?”
Me: “Yes”
He: “We’re producing a book and the girl that does the book layouts has gone and we’re in a hurry. Have you ever done the layout for a book using Adobe InDesign?”
Me: “No”
He: “As you work with computers that should be easy for you even if you haven’t used it”.
Me: “I make software applications. That does not have any similarity to designing book layouts”.
He: “So… will you do it?”
Me: “LOL”

I like working with graphics applications but I prefer making programs. I was competent in 3D Studio and Autocad ages ago; I’m competent in Photoshop. I always like to explore other applications when I have time.

I finally accepted as he was in a hurry to publish the book and it shouldn’t take too long. I’m glad I did it. The job was boring but my main interest was to learn InDesign. I liked the program. It was powerful but not very intuitive in some aspects. The only thing I really missed was TableStyles.

If that wasn’t enough I had to retouch some pics (mental note: think before talking and shut up more often). I’m proud of this one:

Welcome to my blog.

Here is my short bio:

Manuel Abadia was born in Orihuela (Spain) in 1978.

He had his MS Degree in Computer Science (Univ. Murcia, Spain). He is a Freelance Developer and Trainer in Murcia (Spain). He was the Developer for the MoviTAP project that won the first prize in the Microsoft and Vodafone mobile web Services contest.

He has done some external work in companies like Namco America Inc. and Gaelco SA.

He has contributed to the MAME project ( http://www.mamedev.com ) for some years and continues to do so eventually.

I plan to post here things mainly related to asp.net, but from time to time probably I'll post something about my other hobbies (electric guitar, video games...)